


Anchor

by creepstakes (orphan_account)



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brainwashing, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, On the Run, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-10-29
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:02:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/creepstakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes. Who the hell is Bucky Barnes?</p><p>Winter Soldier resolves to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Tovaricsh means comrade.

Winter Soldier thinks (not for the first time, though he is unaware of the fact) that Moscow is as familiar to him as New York.  If he’s spent equal time in both places then he can’t remember it. Moscow isn’t home and neither is New York.

Winter was. Cryofreeze was.

He locates a flophouse and rents a room for a week. Sets up the same traps, preforms the same ritual of sleeping with his back to the door. Twice someone out of their mind on drugs tries to sneak in and steal anything they could. Both of them end up in the Moskva river.

He moves after that. Finds a place on the other side of town that doesn’t ask questions or even mind when he rips the old lock off the door and replaces it with a deadbolt. The door itself is a piece of shit, has a gap between the bottom of the door and the floor wide enough for him to stick three fingers through, but it was a door and he sleeps with his back against it anyway.

Still he wakes every two hours, like clockwork. Between them there were the dreams.

Steve. The sound of Lugers. Crunch of bones.

There was one change, however. The sound of wolves howling. _Howling_.

Why howling?

Now the sound of artillery fire is the wolves and sometimes he sees their eyes. The wolves faces are covered in blood. The animal foams at the mouth and takes a step forward, lurches a feint, teeth bared. Snow.

Dull sound of metal on metal.

His fist colliding with Captain America’s shield, he feels the tremor in his arm all the way up into his chest all over again.

His days are spent searching. Luring.

He goes to his old cache points, takes his weapons and shifts them to places his handlers were unaware of. Sometimes the weapons are gone before he gets there, and it makes him flatten out against the ground and pull his gun up. Round in the chamber, safety off. No one around.

Perhaps another asset.

No. There was only him.

Winter Soldier was _the_ asset.

He moves. Now he has four gym bags full of guns and his backpack is full of clothes. Leather and thick fatigues. He has an old jacket that looks like it came directly from Vietnam and he stares at it, one night, between his short two hour naps.

Leaves against his cheeks. Walking, walking. Humidity. Lost, at risk of failing the mission. Unacceptable. Handlers need a confirmed death in two hours.

He’d come across a railroad and—

Train.

Steve.

Train.

Wolves.

Snow.

Falling.

Steve.

Train.

Winter Soldier can’t breathe.

He gasps and throws the jacket across the room, clutching his Beretta, pressing the cool metal of his hand against his forehead.

He isn’t wearing a shirt and his arm is visible, he’s still holding his gun and yet he forces open the piece of shit window and lets the snow in as he climbs out, drops down two storeys and lands awkwardly, knee giving. He crawls away from the pavement towards the road like the wolves are snapping at his heels, legs sliding along icy concrete.

Face down in a snow drift soon after, gun and arm buried from view, the snow is cool against his face. It sticks in his beard and melts quickly after from the heat of his body. He’s breaking out in a cold sweat.

When he raises his head there’s an old man hobbling out to him. He’s wearing a medal pinned to his greatcoat. Ribbons too. Winter Soldier squints. He can’t see anything, the world is spinning. The street is bare and there’s still too many people.

“Breathe tovarish,” the man says, resting both hands on his cane and huddling against the cold. It’s not windy, in fact it’s dead still but the man is shaking. The man is perhaps seventy, maybe older.

 

 

 

His name is Petrov Koshka. His room is on the same floor as Winter Soldier’s.

“We are the last pure colony of the Vikings, you know, tovarish,” the old man says as he leads Winter Soldier back up the stairs, taking his time.

Winter Soldier had watched for the first ten minutes, standing two steps behind him as Koshka had worked his way up laboriously with his cane, wobbling. Now Winter Soldier has his hand supporting the old man under his upper arm and he wobbles less, takes the steps quicker, smoother.

If Koshka thinks anything strange about his arm, he says nothing. Instead he rambles.

“All of the other land was settled by foreigners, but we are pure. We are Rus. And where do the gods return to? Fucking America,” Koshka pauses, and spits to the side, face shaping into an expression of disgust.  

When they make it to their floor, Koshka pauses, hands shaking. He points at the hallway, to where Winter Soldier’s door is open.

People come and go from their rooms, flowing around them to head for the communal bathroom and kitchen on their floor, or past them down to the stairwell. So many people movie about so soon after his flashback make Winter Soldier’s hand reach for his gun again as he tenses up. Koshka thumps him in the chest with a withered hand and it snaps him out of it, anxiety high, but distraction helping.

People hover in doorways, clutching guns of their own, watching warily. Winter Soldier places a hand on Koshka’s shoulder briefly and then goes to check his room.

Nothing has moved.

He turns and stands in his doorway as Koshka shuffles by, grunting a little waving a hand for Winter Soldier to follow him.

He hesitates and Koshka notices. Turns his whole body instead of craning his neck around and gives Winter Soldier a glare with sunken eyes. He hits Winter Soldier’s leg with his cane, and Winter Soldier tilts his head at him. His lips thin, blue eyes darkening.

“Tea, you stubborn bastard,” Koshka says, shaking his head and turning.

Winter Soldier hesitates and then goes into his room. Pulls on a long sleeved shirt, then a glove. He digs through his supplies until he finds two packets of black tea in his ration packages and water purifying tablets. 

He walks past Koshka on the way to the kitchen, easing around him, gun in hand. “Out,” he says to the people there, gesturing with his gun.

They leave quickly, chairs scraping against the floor.

Koshka chuckles as they flow around him on their way out.

Winter Soldier makes them both black tea without sugar in chipped ceramic mugs without handles and then places them on the table Koshka has chosen to sit at. There’s a window to their immediate left and Winter Soldier sits away from the table, leans back, out of direct line of sight of the window. True snipers could shoot through brick walls, as he had to kill the director (not confirmed, however, the man could still be alive), but few were skilled enough. Still, Winter Soldier worried. 

“What is your story, tovarish?” Koshka asks, resting his wrists on the table, hands cupped around his mug. His knuckles are large and bulbous, fingers long. His nails are yellowed and thick, cracking.

“Special ops,” Winter Soldier says, looking at Koshka. “You were in world war two,” he adds, pointing with his gloved metal hand at the medal he sees again on Koshka’s lapel. It’s in better detail now.

He can’t for the life of him, remember what it’s for.

He’s getting used to the sensation of a lack of déjà vu in this country. In New York it had been all pervasive, and Brooklyn had been the worst. Here there is nothing.

Just a howling, cold wind.

“And the civil war,” Koshka says, bringing him back.

Koshka is sipping at his tea. He slips one hand from around his mug gestures to the room at large. The wallpaper is rotting and half of the floor tiles are chipped, the sink is rusting and the water from the pipes is brown. They’re sitting on plastic hairs at a portable poker table in a flop house that had sixty rooms per floor, one bathroom and kitchen per floor and no heating. “This,” Koshka says, “is the result. Fucking Soviets. Stalin fucked it up. Our dreams died with Lenin, rest his soul. I go to see him every week.”

Winter Soldier sips at his tea. Stares into the black depths.

They fall silent.

Koshka sighs. “Ops, hmn. How deep?”

Winter Soldier frowns.

“I don’t remember.”

Koshka grunts.

Someone tries to enter the kitchen and Winter Soldier has his gun up, held level, in the space of one footfall to the next. “Out,” he growls, and it’s only a kid of fifteen maybe, so they sink to the floor and scramble away quickly. Winter Soldier turns his attention back to Koshka.

Koshka is looking at him, eyes a little narrow.

“Codename?” he asks.

“Winter Soldier,” he says and the recognition in Koshka’s eyes in immediate.

“Ah, I was right to call you tovarish,” he says, slapping the table. He smiles. “I knew it.”

Winter Soldier stares. “I no longer work for them,” he said, sipping his tea. 

Koshka’s smile drops and he seems to be deep in contemplation, rolling his tea about in his cup. “As I said, our dream died with Lenin. Still, you did good things for Russia. You are a great man, but I have heard what it took, and now I see.”

Winter Soldier stares. “I don’t know who I am.”

Koshka looks at the table. Nods. “You…are a ghost.”

“I was told that I’m American,” he says and watches Koshka closely.

He only laughed. “I can hear it in your voice, tovarish. But you are Russian, it is in your blood now. What you were, who you were born as, does not make you who you are now. If you chose to be Russian, then you are Russian,” he says, slapping the table and meeting Winter Soldier’s eyes sternly.

Winter Soldier holds his gaze. “And if I chose to be American?”

Koshka is silent for a long while. “Would they give you a bitter life than this?” Koshka asked, pointing to the room around them again. “Would they help you with this?” he asked, tapping his temple.

Winter Soldier thinks of the SHEILD base, now in shambles, of the man with the shield, Steve, who said they know each other. Thinks of James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes.

Koshka continues. “This country is doomed. It’s fallen into shit. You want to live better? You get out. Go elsewhere in Europe. If you must, go to America. Make sure you have money, or it’s a waste of time.”

“I would be trading everything for a better prison cell,” he said, finishing his tea. “Maybe a different make of bullet.”

Koshka grunted, looked disturbed. “Guantanamo, tovarish. Do everything you can to stay away from it. You’d be better off in a camp with the Fritz, sucking gas.”

Winter Soldier blinks and he’s across the room, pressed to the wall, gasping. A car siren screeched outside, the sound ringing through his mind. Rattling around inside his brain. All he can hear is the whine of metal ripping away from the side of the train, howling wind in his hears. Wolves.

He slides down the wall, pushes his hair out of his face.

Koshka is at the table still, watching him calmly.

Winter Soldier’s cup and the rest of his tea is splashed all over the floor, chair upturned.

There is a beat, and then Koshka says, “Go to the Amer, tovarish. Perhaps they can help you better than this broken country can. Know that you are Russian in your heart. If the old gods see something good in it, then perhaps there is hope yet.”

 

 

 

Winter Soldier stuffs five thousand dollars into Koshka’s pillow case before he leaves the next morning, spends the other five grand bartering passage on a Swedish Maersk vessel headed for the port of Oakland.

They offer to hide him in a container if he gives them one of his gym bags. He gives them the AKs with traceable rounds.

They let him sleep in the captain’s quarters.

He declines.

He sleeps in the galley dry food storage, back to the door, Beretta in hand, waking every half an hour with the amount of traffic flowing through the kitchen itself. During the day he spends his time researching James Buchanan Barnes, Bucky.

Hears wolves howling.

Sees a train.

A chasm bellow.

It takes the cargo vessel 36 days to reach California. It takes Winter Soldier three days to steal a car and make his way back to New York.

He sells the car and some of his guns, rents a room in a flop house.

Waits.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Winter Soldier returns to America.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did anyone notice how many weapons Bucky carries on him? A lot.
> 
> I'm not sure what his sniper rifle is, so I'll just say it's the Dragonov and leave it at that.

Winter Soldier has fifty thousand dollars to his name.

He can make more.

Instead he looks for his hidden caches of guns, rations and medkits, each of which have ten thousand in cash, and moves them.

Three streets down from his flophouse there’s a Starbucks. The coffee costs more than a single weeks wage. Somehow Winter Soldier knows it’s inflation but when he stands outside on the street, staring at his Americano, he has no idea how he knows about inflation.

He walks and walks and eventually, once the sun is beginning to set, he reaches Central Park.

He gets as close to the centre of it as he can and lays on his back in the grass, splayed out, Glock digging into his lower back. It’s too overcast to see the stars, and the sun turns the clouds an interesting shade of orange.

Winter Soldier cannot remember how he knows that with the way his Glock is digging into his back, he’d have exactly one and a half seconds before he could be on his feet and discharging his weapon. He does not remember how he came to learn how to correctly care for his weapons, how to dismantle and clean and put his weapons back together again. All of them. Sniper rifles, pistols, revolvers, grenades and missile launchers, assault rifles. The list could go on and in all of them, Winter Soldier finds that he knows each and every one of them front to back.

He knows his poisons. Knows that ricin is his favourite.

Knows how to hotwire a car so long as he can get the hood open. Knows every model and make of car including the potential specs of modifications that can be made to ensure such cars are bulletproof.

Knows the human body inside and out. He lists every bone in the human body, lips moving but nothing but whispers leaving his lips. Then every muscle.

A drunken couple stumble past him, laughing, and his fingers dig into the grass, heart pounding against his ribcage.

He knows exactly how many ounces they have drunk in order to reach their level of intoxication. Can calculate within a small margin of error what their blood alcohol content would be.

Winter Soldier remembers every license plate of every car parked along the street he’d taken to Central Park.

Winter Soldier is still on his back staring up at the sky, cataloguing, when the sun begins to rise. The grass is making him itchy where it reaches his middle back between his canvas jacket, his flannel shirt and two undershirts rucked up around his Glock.

 

He falls asleep, exhausted.

 

_Debris falls._

_Captain America goes down with it._

_The man doesn’t scream. Doesn’t do anything but watch Winter Soldier as he falls. Loses consciousness before he hits the water, eyes rolling back in his head._

 

Falling.

Falling.

 

 _Winter Soldier swallows thickly, broken arm hanging by his side. He’s locked his metal arm so that he couldn’t possibly lose grip of the girder. Couldn’t fall. But the carrier is falling anyway. He looks up and a large glass pane is falling down._ _He’s going to fall._

 

Howling.

_He’s going to fall._

Howling.

Train.

Fall.

Train.

 

_The pane hits the girder and Winter Soldier electrifies his own fingers so he doesn’t lose grip, but a another girder smashes into the one he’s clinging to and he falls anyway._

 

_Winter Soldier screams._

 

End of the line.

 

_“I’m with you ‘till the end of the line, pal,” he’s said, staring at Steve, smiling gently. He doesn’t look up.  He can see the pain in his eyes for a moment, but Steve ducks his head._

_Raises it back up again and there’s nothing but relief in them._

_“I’m fine, Buck. Really.”_

_He could feel Steve’s collar bone through his suit. He’s so thin. So stubborn._

 

_Winter Soldier breaks the surface of the water with Captain America pulled against his chest with his metal arm. His broken arm is useless, but the water takes the pressure off the break in his elbow. Needs to take something for the pain which is starting to reach a level which prevents him from functioning at an acceptable level._

_He leaves Captain America on the shore of the Potomac after checking he is, at the very least breathing._

 

Winter Soldier wakes up gasping, sun on his face. He hears laughter. Children.

He looks over to his right and sees a family a good deal of distance away, throwing frisbee.

He sees dirt flying from bullets missing their target, hears the clap of lugers discharging, sees Steve throw the shield. Three fritz go down and he grins, raises his rifle.

Winter Soldier pulls his truckers hat off his head and runs his gloved hand through his hair, panting.  

James Buchanan Barnes.

He doesn’t know who that is beyond the face staring back at him from the museum memorial on sandblasted glass, fatigues on a mannequin, an epilogue.

But he remembers some things.

He remembers the day of Steve’s mother’s funeral.

He remembers falling.

He remembers...seeing...Steve fight. Being there.

Once they had been on the same side.

Once, Winter Soldier had fought with Captain America.

Winter Soldier had...once...been American.

He knows this. Had told Koshka as much. But his head was falling apart. He remembered things and when he did, he felt, for the first time…

Turmoil.

He had never felt that before. That he could remember. Could never remember being indecisive. Could never remember being anything but sure of himself, of his skills.

He takes his canvas jacket off and wraps it around his waist. Makes sure the button on the sleeve of his flannel shirt is buttoned over his glove and walks back towards his flophouse. It’s hot.

Koshka had told him, in no uncertain terms, to seek help for his mind. He knows a lot of it is PTSD, knows his memories are something else. Hydra had used him to shape the world. He remembered that, had been told that several times in the three days of memory he’d managed to retain before the fall of the helicarriers. He’d pulled Captain America from the Potomac on the third. On the fourteenth Captain America had found his apartment and stormed it, albeit gently.

He’d left the country on the sixteenth day of memory. Returned to America on the fifty seventh.

He has a memory from 1920...something. Was it the 20s? Or the 30s?

Steve’s mother’s funeral.

There are many, many years missing.

Captain America knows what is missing.

 

Steve.

_“Bucky,” he pleaded. “You’ve known me your whole life.”_

Steve.

_“I’m not going to fight you,” Captain America had said, dropping his shield through a broken pane and letting it fall into the Potomac. “You’re my friend.”_

Steve.

 

Winter Soldier goes back to his flophouse. He washes his face and showers briefly then goes back to his room, sliding around children running down the hall. It takes him two days to hide him gym bags but, by the end, there is only his backpack.

Inside he has his black fatigues, his laptop and a single packet of rations. No money because he’s hidden that too. He keeps only four weapons. Three knives and his glock. He has seven magazines in his backpack along with a box of ammo.

He goes to the nearest public library and uses one of the computers there, hat pulled down low over his face.

If Hydra is looking for him, and they will be, then he can’t afford to be seen. Not yet.

This is why he’s in the public library, using a public computer to hack into the Hydra secure server. He can’t do anything about the people walking around, but for the most part they are interested in their own books, their own searches. They whisper quietly if there is more than one, but there are two teenaged girls who talk loudly off to his right, and they invite annoyance from others which draws the attention off him.

Still, every so often, he looks back up at them as he types.

The secure server fails to connect twice.

On the third it brings up a pure white screen with a green, blinking over strike cursor.

Winter Soldier types 32557 and then pauses.

His hand shakes as he deletes the dog tag numbers. Remains staring down at the keyboard, eyes slightly wide as he chews at his lips, hair in his face as he remembers.

 

_“What happened to you?” he asked, leaning against Steve. He was huge, taller than him, and that was strange, but for the moment, nothing seemed right. Everything seemed….off. His thoughts kept jumping. He couldn’t walk under his own power for a moment._

_“I joined the army,” Steve replied, and it sounded so simple. So obvious._

_Of course he’d joined the army._  

 

Winter Soldier blinks several times as the memory clears.

The girls are quiet.

Winter Soldier looks up and over at them. They’ve gone.

He turns in his chair and finds there is only two other people in close proximity, but his own thoughts had damaged his time window. He punches his thigh with his metal arm in frustration, and the pain blooms, but he’s unable to focus on it.

He keeps trying.

Focuses on the sounds around him.

No gunshots. No explosions and the sound of Steve’s breathing.

Just footsteps and the occasional clack of keys, whispered words and the turn of pages.

Winter Soldier can feel the pain again. Properly this time. His mind is entirely back.

He turns his attention to the screen and freezes at the text there.

**Bucky**

Winter Soldier swallows thickly.

There is a long, long wait. Winter Soldier times it to three minutes and then his lips thin. The library is beginning to fill with too many people, he has to cut this off soon. He doesn’t know how SHIELD can get into the Hydra secure server but they have managed.

More appears.

**Can we meet somewhere?**

_“Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone on Coney Island?” he’d asked, the line stretching far, far too long._

_“Yeah and I threw up?”_

_“This is payback isn’t it?”_

_Steve’s grin had been blinding, to him. “Now why---”_

 

Pain in his thigh. Turning pages. Footsteps.

Winter Soldier takes a deep breath and looks back at the screen. Steve has written something else.

**Bucky?**

Winter Soldier clenches his jaw, staring at the blinking cursor and then shakes his head. He could go. Could see him. Could get his answers.

But it feels wrong. Feels reckless. Feels like he’d be acting outside of orders--

Orders.

He disconnects from the secure server. Walks out of the library, hat pulled down. He stands outside for several minutes leaning against a wall. Notices several people walk into the building with concealed weapons soon after.

Hydra or the new SHEILD, whatever they may now be called.

He needs to know what his situation is before he can talk to him.

 

He goes to a cafe where he can keep his back to the wall. Pays for tea because while he knows he should get water it’s...a choice he can make, and wants to make. It’s...freedom.

He sets up his laptop. He writes automatically and without thinking, a code for his own secure server, not knowing how he knows how to do so. When he thinks about it he forgets. Isn’t sure what it is he’s looking at, what the words and symbols mean.

The tea is wrong.

There’s no leaves in it.

He winces as he sips at it, notices the waitress hide her smile as she watches, though there is concern in them. He knows that he does not look like he can afford the laptop in front of him, knows that he looks like, in this moment, exactly what he is and that is a fugitive.

Stark Tower.

That was where he could find Steve.

It was the  reason he had come to New York instead of returning to DC.

The A on the side of the tower looks different now though, it’s the A the men had worn when they’d come to find him in his apartment, the one he’d blown up.

He spends three more days writing hacking programs and then delves into the mass of information dumped onto the internet. There are other independent servers with unleaked information and so he looks at them, finds what he needs.

He has a list of addresses.

He memorises them.

Returns to his flophouse.

He swaps his civilian clothes with his black fatigues and a leather jacket. He takes his gym bag and goes to the last untapped cache. He finds another mask. There are no glasses but they are easy to come by.

He buys some from a drugstore at 3 am in the morning.

The man behind the counter says, “You know you can get two for three?” without looking up at Winter Soldier as he reads his paper.

When he does look up he freezes, mouth falling open a little.

Winter Soldier doesn’t have his mask on, has no camouflage paint on his face. Whatever the man sees, it’s the same everyone else sees.

Winter Soldier stares at the man for a second, then turns on his heel and takes a bottle of water from the fridge---

Cold.

Howling.

Train.

\--beside the the counter and places beside his glasses a little more forcefully than necessary.

The man clears his throat and nods. “Alright buddy,” he says, ringing him up.

Winter Soldier gives him the required amount and leaves. Drinks the water and keeps the bottle, places the glasses over his eyes, relaxes at the sudden ease from the lights on the street. He’d gone through his withdrawal in the dry food storage in the galley of the Maersk vessel, but sometimes the light still hurts his eyes, even if it’s only streetlights.

He buys a car for three grand and drives it to the first address on his list. It’s Hudson Valley, a city called Troy he has never been to.

That he could remember.

A few miles out of Troy, through winding roads, there’s a loose gravel road. There’s an old boomgate not a hundred metres set back off the asphalt that’s chained shut with a private property sign stapled to it.

Winter Soldier’s GPS coordinates tell him he has to go down that road, into the forest.

He doesn’t.

He drives into downtown Troy and parks his car in a lot. He leaves the car there as he moves through the streets at a slow, languid pace, hands in his leather jacket pockets, gym bag slung over his shoulder. People pass him by. They don’t stare and they cast him more than brief, cursory looks.

He walks and walks.

Eventually he makes it out of town.

Before he can see that loose gravel road again he hears a truck coming up behind him. He slips the strap of his gym bag off his shoulder, holds the handles clenched in his metal arm and runs, careful not to jostle the bag’s contents. He ducks into the forest, using it as cover and leaps over logs and ditches, running ahead of the truck, keeping an eye on it.

Winter Soldier realises he could run a lot longer before he ran out of breath, but this was the limit of his speed.

He stops on an outcrop hidden by the trees that allows him to see the loose gravel road and the chained boomgate down below, forcing his breathing to still as he takes cover, watching while he unzips his gym bag. Watches the truck stop by the gate. The driver get out.

Winter Soldier narrows his eyes, takes them off the man for a moment while he fixes a sight to his rifle, then raises it. Wind stirs his hair gently and the sun doesn't reach him in his patch of shade, back against a tree, leaning around it to watch.

His breathing calms.

It’s a woman, not a man. She’s dressed in black combat gear. She’s carrying an AK-47, looking down the road. She looks annoyed.   

After a moment Winter Soldier hears the hum of a car coming down from the loose gravel road and he shifts to lay down on the ground slowly, then looks through his sight again, better hidden and with a wider view of the proceedings. A jeep with two men in it flys down the roach and screeches to a halt at gate. One of the men jumps from the car and goes to the chain on the boomgate, unlocking it and then raising it.

The woman shouts, “Kak vas zavut?” looking pissed off, asking the man’s name.  

He replies and what the woman says next is indistinguishable. Winter Soldier frowns. He can’t hear them, she’s shouting too much to make lip-reading possible.

Winter Soldier grips his rifle a little tighter. After a moment he realises the sensation rising in him is frustration.

She yells at him for a moment, then shakes her head and turns back to the truck, climbs in. The Jeep the men had arrived in drives off the side of the road to make room for the large truck to pass, the trailer barely making it around the corner as she pulls in. The men stay to lock the gate again and Winter Soldier watches the truck go then, looks down at the men again. The man looks nervous as he does up the lock again, jumps back into the Jeep, they take back off down the road, following the truck.  

Winter Soldier pushes himself up and takes the sight off his rifle and swaps it out for a Dragunov sniper rifle and attaches a different, more powerful sight to it. He slings the bag back over one shoulder and the rifle over the other, he moves through the forest at a much slower pace, ears pricked for any sound.

He follows the road, interested to see where it will lead.

He can hear voices, eventually, but not see them. He has gone off course.

He backtracks and finds that the road goes down, opens up into a clearing where there’s a building rather like a loading dock. The truck is there, too large for the bay doors, parked to the side and the woman is out, watching several men pull back the tarps. They remove the gates from the trailer, exposing the cargo.

Winter Soldier tilts his head. He moves back a bit and shifts, finds a better position. He finds a place shaded from the sun, hidden by the trees and shrubs and sets up his rifle. He has a drink of water, places his mask on, and checks the sun’s position in the sky briefly.

He settles in to watch.

The woman from the truck finds the man from the Jeep who had been late to unlock the gate for her. Winter Soldier’s stronger sight allows him to read her lips better. “Ostat'sya zdes',” she says, telling the man to stay by her side, looking pissed off as she watches the cargo being unloaded.

Winter Soldier realises the cargo is not all in crates at his new vantage point. Some of it is gleaming metal wrapped up in plastic and chained down.

Winter Soldier stops looking at the woman and concentrates on the cargo, eyebrows drawing down, lips thinning. A bird calls from the tree above him, not realising he’s bellow it. Another one answeres some few trees away. They serenade each other and then the crash comes as one of the crates drop, they take flight.

His chair spills out of the broken pine crate.

 

_“But I knew him,” he says, and Alexander Pierce steals his eyes some and sighs. He pushes himself up off the chair._

_Winter Soldier can see Rumlow standing behind him, watching dispassionately._

_“Prep hi--”_

 

Winter Soldier bites his tongue, brings himself back, blinking profusely at the pain. He hears the birds again settled once more, sees the woman screaming. She slings her AK over her shoulder and takes a pistol from her thigh holster instead.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

Three men fall, blood splattering against the truck.

All movement in the clearing stops. The guards lining the perimeter raise their guns, but not at the woman. Instead they aim at the workers. She turns and takes the man from the jeep who had been beside her, shoves him to his knees and presses the butt of the gun again his head. She screams loud enough for Winter Soldier to be able to hear her. “Yesli vy boites' vraga, vy ne ostat'sya v zhivykh!” 

Berating him for being afraid, she shifts the gun away, then pulls the whimpering man’s head down onto her knee. He reels, coughing, blood spurting from his nose when she releases him.

She walks in a circle looking at all of the workers around her, breathing heavily. Most stand watching her. Some are afraid but most are dispassionate. The guards laugh with the exception of one, who reaches into his coat and pulls out a flagon of what Winter Soldier knows must be alcohol.

“Vernut'sya k rabote,” she shouts again. Tells them to get back to work.

She turns to the man she’d just broken the nose of and aims her pistol at his head again.

Clap.

More blood. Another body.

She shakes her head and disappears into the building.

The closest guard raises his submachine gun and screams. “Vy slyshali mayor!”

The workers are obedient and start moving again. They’re more careful with the cargo this time.

They don’t clear away the bodies for another solid hour. They serve as a warning.

 

Winter Soldier watches for three days, following the movements of the guards. The female Major comes and goes, often delivering large amounts of cargo, though none quite as large as the first.

She starts training the workers.

The workers are volunteers, he has learned from the two guards that meet below his hiding place on their rounds. Hydra, with their secrets dumped across the internet, had only taken it as a recruiting opportunity.

Winter Soldier knows that ideals are something difficult to defeat.

If there is a chain of command,  Winter Soldier doesn’t know it.

If there’s a new leader of Hydra, Winter Soldier doesn’t know them.

Winter Soldier doesn’t remember the ones who commanded him before Peirce.

He remembers--

 

Falling.

Potomac.

Howling.

 

Winter Soldier bites his tongue, focuses on the pain to bring himself back.

He breathes in the scent of cigarette smoke and shifts,  pulling his head away from the sight and blinking several times. He looks down the cliff-face to the two guards there. They’re meeting in their rounds again.  

At night they pause and share a cigarette when the hour is quiet and dead and boring. They look up into the forest itself, disconcerted sometimes looking at Winter Soldier directly but never seeing him, hidden in the shadows as he is.

Winter Soldier agrees with them in those wordless, concerned looks they shoot up at the small cliff-face. It had been far too easy for Winter Soldier to find a place to sit and wait, watch and learn. Whoever designed the upper level of the facility is an idiot, but then it feels as if it was made for snipers like himself.

It’s drizzling lightly, rain fluttering down to the muddied ground like snow, lit by large industrial floodlights. The workers are primarily labourers. Over the past three days they’ve set down concrete pads around the existing facility. More are to come.

This is only the construction of a Hydra base.

It is not yet one.

If there’s more levels beneath this one, and they have at least two more to go before they reach Winter Soldier’s level, then no one will ever be able to find it. It will be an entirely underground base.

Winter Soldier clenches his jaw and pulls back, away from his Dragonov. He crawls away from the ledge quietly, back over to his gym bag. His dark hair sticks to his face and his leather jacket creaks from the rain.

He unzips it as quietly as he can and pushes the jacket into his gym bag, metal arm gleaming in the moonlight that reaches through the trees. The rain collects in the leaves of the trees above him, falls down onto his arm and makes soft metallic sounds.   

Winter Soldier is going to have to eat soon. Four days is his limit. He hasn’t moved or slept in three. His muscles ache, but it’s ignorable. It isn't pain, only discomfort and thus irrelevant information. He focuses on his mission.

He looks down at his bag.

Winter Soldier’s eyes are wide and he doesn’t realise he’s shaking.

Mission.

His mission was to ensure that the Project Insight was not a failure.

Steve had stopped him.

Winter Soldier has the sense-memory that it had never happened before. If there was a contingency plan, Winter Soldier didn't know it. He was on his own. Floundering.

Winter Soldier looks back over at the light rising from the edge of the cliff. He blinks raindrops from his eyelashes and surveys the wet leaves and soil shining with the light of the floodlights in the pit below.  

He was calmer here.

Here everything made sense.

When he had...a mission, a purpose, the memories were less blinding. Quicker. Less painful.

His time in DC had been disorientating and the sensation had followed him to Russia, then to New York. Now, here, despite Steve’s attempt at communication, he felt...right.

But--

But.

Steve.

When did he become Steve, instead of Captain America?

He punches his thigh. Pain draws him back. He releases a breath and looks up at the moon, at the rain and back over at the light rising from the base.

He swallows thickly and returns to the ledge.

There’s a large truck there, by the building the Major disappeared into the first time he’d seen her. It’s full of cargo they hadn’t yet had a chance to unload. Sunset had fallen and, like clockwork, they had all disappeared into the building but for the guards.

Winter Soldier repeats to himself the mission he’d made for himself when he’d left New York City.

Find out what Hydra’s plans for him are now. The presence of the chair meant he was needed still, or perhaps they hope to find him.

The chair is broken.

He does not want to lose all of the progress he has gained so far. Could not allow himself to lose it.

If there is another chair in that truck he can't simply let it go.

Winter Soldier looks into his bag and sets his jaw, pulls out an assault rifle and slides the strap over his shoulder. He fills his pockets with magazines, knives, emps. Straps his two smaller pistols to his right thigh and his SIG on his left. Straps the Skorpion on his back.

Then he turns and runs to the edge of the pit, jumps.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Winter Soldier seeks out Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nyet = No  
> Predatel = Traitor

Winter Soldier is back in New York again.

It’s still raining. Has been for the full week since he returned from Troy.

He’s standing before Stark Tower. Those around him call it the Avengers Tower now.

Winter Soldier watches people enter and exit while he eats pound cake from one of his ration packs mechanically.

People go in and out of the wide glass doors. Occasionally expensive, official looking cars pull up out front, then pull away. There are enough nondescript black SUVs to make the hair on the back of Winter Soldier’s neck stand up on end. Some of the cars have signs of iron plating, various others show efforts of bullet proofing.

The people who enter the tower, Winter Soldier notes, get given badges. Not everyone wears them.

The Chrysler Building is about the same height. Winter Soldier looks up, calculating, brim of his hat blocking his view some but keeping the rain off his face.  

He balls up the packet his pound cake had come in and throws it into the nearest trash can.

Two hours later he is crawling up into the spire of the Chrysler Building and settling himself within the metal spokes at the very top, wind blowing in his hair. There’s wiring everywhere, pathways for the spire to act as a radio tower, for reception on phones and various other things Winter Soldier wasn’t briefed on this time around. His metal arm is bared, gleaming. It’s still raining and it’s cold and miserable, the steel of the spire slippery under Winter Soldier’s boots.

Rained seeps into his fatigues though his jacket protects him some. He’d left his over jacket at his current base of operations, but his current clothing is enough.

Winter Soldier doesn’t question why he’d prepared himself for battle. He just is.

It feels right.

Winter Soldier rarely argues with the sense-memory, with the impulses that keep him alive, that get his missions completed.

He hoists his Dragonov up again, sets it by his side like an old friend. A precaution, stuck like a toothpick between the struts of the spire. Winter Soldier barely fits in the middle of the spire itself, but he can’t risk being knocked off the building, especially when several of the Avengers, as they’re calling themselves, fly.

He raises his binoculars and focuses on the Avengers Tower. He can see, at present, through three floors before perspective begins to become an issue. None have any visible movement.

The rain makes it more difficult to see. It also plasters his hair to his forehead and what of his neck that isn't covered. It’s refreshing, in a way.

A full hour with no movement passes. Winter Soldier takes the phone he’d bought off a contact and punches in a number. Raises the phone to his ear. He blinks slowly, watching the floors, hidden amongst the steel and rain.

The call connects. “This is Steve,” comes the voice.

  


_“You’re my friend.”_

  


Winter Soldier swallows thickly, and lowers his binoculars and stares at the Tower, it’s raining too heavily to see much of anything now. It'll ease in a moment.

“Bucky?” Steve sounds both hopeful and tentative. There’s nothing but quiet on Steve’s end of the line for a moment and then there’s a rustle.

Winter Soldier raises his binoculars. He sees a figure run one one side of the middle floor to the other, then disappear behind a wall but he can’t make out much more than that. Without his handlers to supply him with equipment better suited for the current conditions, Winter Soldier has only what had been in his caches and infra-red had not been included in them. He will have to make do for now.

“Bucky... Please,” Steve says, and takes a deep breath. “Are you… Are you injured?”

“Nyet,” Winter Soldier states automatically.

There’s a pause and it makes Winter Soldier blink and tilt his head, eyes flicking back and forth. He doesn't understand it, the way that pause is full of pain, how he knows it’s pain, when all he could hear was the small hitch of Steve’s breath. “Okay, that’s good, Buck, real good,” Steve says, letting out a shaking breath. “I just wanted to say thank you for… for everything, Bucky. For stopping in DC.”

Winter Soldier says nothing. He stares at the raindrops splashing on his arm. Blinks every so often as the water collects on his eyelashes. He shivers, and it’s only because of that that Winter Soldier knows that his body is starting to try to conserve heat.

He’s been out of cryo too long.

Cold doesn’t usually register.

“Still with me, Bucky?” Steve asks, voice hoarse.

Winter Soldier blinks. Frowns. “What is the howling?” he asks, looking up and over at the tower again. The rain has eased and so he raises his binoculars again.

He sees several people standing against the windows now and Winter Soldier stills. Anthony Edward Stark is there, tapping at a tablet, and beside him stands Natalia Allianova Romanova, Samuel Thomas Wilson and finally Steve Rogers.

“The howling?” Steve asks, frowning a little, looking down then over at Romanova. She tilts her head then shrugs and Stark lowers his tablet, pulls the phone from Steve’s hand and points up.

Winter Soldier lip reads Stark. “--speakerphone, then we can all hear what your crazy ass assassin boyfriend is saying.”

Winter Soldier lowers his binoculars, lets them fall to his lap and shifts to set the butt of his Dragonov against his shoulder and tilts his head while he looks down the sight. He adjusts the focus with one hand while he holds the phone to his ear with his shoulder.

“There was a train,” Winter Soldier says and watches Steve’s expression fall as he brings it into focus. “Howling. I fell. I see wolves. Hear them.”

Steve swallows thickly and Winter Soldier spans his sight across to Stark. The man is looking down at the floor, arms crossed over his chest. The tension in his shoulders eased at the expression the man is wearing. He takes his finger off the trigger, places his finger along the trigger guard instead and takes a deep breath.

“Howling,” Steve repeats, arms crossed over his chest. “Bucky, when you were… You served with a team under my command in 1945, Bucky. The Howling Commandos. You chose them.”

Winter Soldier blinks.

Blinks again.

“I saw them,” he says.

Steve frowns, and tilts his head, looking over at Romanova.

“In the Smithsonian,” Winter Soldier adds and Steve relaxes a little.

“Yeah?” Steve says, smiles a little though even from here Winter Soldier can see the pain in his eyes. “It’s a good exhibit, isn’t it? Did you like it?”

“I don’t….remember it,” Winter Soldier says, shivering again as the wind picks up.

“I know,” Steve says, sounding pained again. He makes a useless gesture with his hand, stares into space and talks at the skyline, likely not because he knew Winter Soldier was there, but because he needed something to talk at. “I want to help you with that, Bucky. I missed you. So much, and you’re my friend.”

Winter Soldier sighs and shifts a little, and suddenly Stark, Romanova and Wilson drop to the ground. Wilson crawls over to Steve and tugs at his leg. Over the line Winter Soldier can hear Wilson telling Steve to get down, but Steve remains standing. He takes a step forward instead, eyes going to the Chrysler building, to where Bucky is hidden.

Winter Soldier has been made.

Steve’s eyes aren’t hard, but they’re full of the same resolution and sadness that had been there on the Helicarrier. “Are you going to shoot me, Buck?”

The wind passes through the spokes of the spire and the sound is like a low moan. Like a woman in death throes.

Winter Soldier is silent for a long time.

Eventually he shakes his head, just enough for it to be visible, enough not to disrupt his view of Steve through the sight. “Nyet.”

“Okay,” Steve says, accepting it, just like that. He smiles a little.

 

 

_“I joined the army,” Steve replies, and it sounds so simple. So light._

  


Pain blooms in Winter Soldiers thigh, but he’s back again, albeit panting.

“Bucky?” Steve asks. “Don’t hit yourself, please.”

“I go away for too long if I don’t. I can’t...be unaware, Steve. I can’t…” He takes a deep, gulping breath and blinks rapidly and then twitches.

Sense-memory returns. Eases the chaos.

Winter Soldier’s hand is shaking and he clenches the phone tighter, tight enough to make the plastic goan in his grasp, his metal arm whining a little with the increased pressure.

“Hey, it’s alright. I understand,” Steve says casually, smiling serenely at him.

Movement.

Winter Soldier watches Stark crawl away, shaking.

He lets him go.

After a moment, Romanova shifts to take cover as well, but Wilson remains by Steve’s side. He only rolls onto his back and makes himself less of a target for a second, then crouches by Steve’s side, eyes scanning to Chrysler spire but not zeroing in on Winter Soldier. Instead his eyes go to a screen that suddenly opens up and Bucky can see himself reversed in the image, metal arm gleaming, hair in his face. He’s wearing his mask and his face is shadowed, wet hair dark against his skin.

“I remember your mother’s funeral,” Winter Soldier says flatly turning his eyes back to Steve, ignoring Wilson and the video feed.

Steve smiles sadly. “Yeah. She was a good woman, Bucky. Did what she could for me. But Bucky I need you to do something for me.”

Winter Soldier waits.

“Can you put the rifle down, please, Bucky?”

Winter Soldier finds himself leaning back, away from the Dragonov. Lowering it is harder, involves coaxing it from between the spikes of the spire.

“Thanks, Bucky.” Steve’s voice is distance, ringing in his ears.

Winter Soldier looks over at the Avengers tower and remains still. Through the phone he hears them whispering, hears Natalia murmuring something.

A second later Steve asks, “Bucky, do you have any friends with you?”

Winter Soldier hesitates a moment.

He drops the Dragonov and takes his legs off the rungs of the spire, drops down and then slips out of it, crawls down inside the tower itself, out of their line of sight.

“Troy,” Winter Soldier says after a while, making his way down to the lower levels, to the maintenance hatch he’d crawled up through, pulling his SIG from his holster and flicking the safety off, aiming it at the hatch.

“Just one?” Steve asks, misunderstanding.

Winter Soldier hesitated. Wondered if he should tell Steve about the base at all. Told himself to stick to the original plan.

He thinned his lips. “No. Just me.”

Pain. Someone has blown out the side of the building to get at him, shot through a wall. Sense-memory says it’s a common tactic, one he’s used himself, but he hadn’t been aware another had possessed the skillset.

He notes the arrow in his side. Notes that there’s a mechanism attached, that it’s injecting something into him.

“Predatel,” Winter Soldier curses in Russian, eyes rolling back a little. He stumbles, holds his SIG up aims though the hole in the wall and fires. One, two, three, and then the hatch bursts open and there’s another sense of pain, this time in his chest. Again in his neck.

He slumps against the metal structuring of the inside of the crown of the tower. Three men coming at him, shouting. Pointing their guns at him.

He fires again. Blood splatters out the back of a head.

Pain in his thigh.

The world goes black.

  


_Blue eyes and a smile. “You’re taking all the stupid with you.”_

  


_Zola._

  


_The chair._

  


_World War One. World War Two. Cold War. Vietnam. Afghanistan. America. Afghanistan. Germany. Russia. America._

  


Winter Soldier wakes.

It is not a cell. There are no bars.

Just blank walls and a simple bed. There’s a window that shows him blue sky. The walls are an off white and the ceiling plain white. The carpet is a restrained dark blue, industrial.

There’s a closet.

Winter Soldier looks down at himself, pushes the sheets down and touches his chest. It’s bare, but there’s no bullet wounds. Just puncture wounds from tasers and tranq darts.

He looks at his metal arm. Rotates his wrist and curls his fingers. The servos whine the only sound in the dead-quiet of his room. They function and that is all that matters.

He blinks.

“Steve.”

A voice comes from above, from all around him, soft and lilting. A male voice, English. “Good morning, Sergeant Barnes,” the voice says. “My name is JARVIS, I maintain this house. Captain Rogers has insisted I inform you that you are safe here.”

Winter Soldier stares at the ceiling a moment. “You’re the AI?”

“Correct,” JARVIS says.

Winter Soldier pushes himself up, shoves the sheet off himself and stands beside his bed. Nothing about this room looks sterile, looks like a prison, for all it is plain. The view out the large window is pleasant, and enough to tell him that he’s still in New York.

“Am I a prisoner here?” he asks, tone flat.

JARVIS doesn’t respond for a moment. Eventually though, he says, “Currently, Sir, you are under house arrest. You may move freely about the apartment, but Captain Rogers would appreciate your cooperation in not leaving until he is able to see you.”

Winter Soldier nods and remains staring out the window. His fingers curl, aching for a weapon, for some mode of protection. He feels the light chill of the air against his skin. His nakedness doesn’t register for a long while.

He turns and goes to the closet. There is no hangars, nothing sharp at all, but there are shirts. There are sweatpants and underwear. He pulls them on.

Stares at the door.

“You may leave this room, sir,” JARVIS says, sounding encouraging and polite and yet unemotional all the same.

Winter Soldier blinks.

Stares a while longer.

“Where is Steve?” he asks, seeing blue eyes and blond hair. Seeing blood and that face with all the small lines of stress eased with a state of unconsciousness. Water clinging to pale skin. Red lips.

Red lips.

“Captain Rogers has been delayed, sir. I’m afraid I cannot say much more than that,” JARVIS says, apologetic.

Winter Soldier opens the door to the rest of the apartment. There’s some furniture. A TV.  A lounge room. A kitchen table. A kitchen.

He eats all of the fruit within the fridge and then goes to the floor to ceiling windows in the lounge room and stares out at the skyline of New York.

He thinks about Troy. About the chair.

Thinks about the Hydra base, and all the other Hydra bases that he has the coordinates to.

He wonders if Steve is in Troy, cleaning up the mess he made there.

He waits.

 


End file.
